The JMP 2017 update report presents indicators and baseline estimates for the drinking water, sanitation and hygiene targets within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report introduces the indicators of safely managed drinking water and sanitation services, which go beyond use of improved facilities, to include consideration of the quality of services provided. For the first time, hygiene estimates are reported for 70 countries.

Thanks to modern chemistry, we can detect thousands of chemicals in water, even at extremely low concentrations. The ever-growing list of tests that are available can feel overwhelming, and the vast majority of methods require state-of-the art lab facilities. Fortunately, we don’t need to test for everything! A much smaller and more practical set of tests can provide a good sense of chemical water quality for monitoring purposes. The good news is that there are low-tech versions of these tests for situations when budgets are limited.

We are making progress daily with our vision of giving hope to the hopeless and underprivileged including people with disabilities through our new partnership with Procter & Gamble – Nigeria to reach girls in need of sanitary aid through #APadAGirl2025 campaign Project. The campaign is aimed at encouraging and sensitizing girls between 11 and 16 years of age as well as young women between 18-24 years of age on the importance of using Sanitary pads as against other unhealthy options like old clothes and tissue, thereby promoting menstrual hygiene.

In its latest podcast, USAID’s Global Waters Radio takes you to Ghana to gain on-the-ground insights into how water treatment supplies are marketed and distributed to Ghanaian households. Global Waters Radio recently spoke with Aquatabs distributor Ernest Saka Ansong and vendor Asieduwaa Ofori Darko.

October 15 is Global Handwashing Day, a global advocacy day dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding about the importance of handwashing with. Every year, Global Handwashing Day is celebrated with events, campaigns, and handwashing programs around the world.

Before each Global Handwashing Day, the Global Handwashing Partnership selects a theme that will inspire celebrants and encourage handwashing with soap beyond October 15. This year’s theme is ‘Our Hands, Our Future’, reminding us that handwashing protects our own health, but also allows us to build our own futures, as well as those of our communities, and the world.

When the floods came and privacy and safety were harder to find, the Kumar family decided to take out a loan and build a toilet instead of using nearby fields. The impact has been greater than they could have imagined.
This is the third video in a series about efforts to combat diarrheal disease in India.

A carefully managed paitan helps conserve each and every drop of rain received during the monsoons, in turn recharging all the kuiyan every year. Social rules have been defined by the community regarding maintenance of cleanliness in the paitan and general management of the community’s water wealth. These rules are strictly followed, and defaulters may have to pay heavy fines. A recharged kuin is able to supply drinking water to the village households almost throughout the year.

Pitchers being filled with water drawn from a kuin(Photo by: Om Prakash Singh)

The depth of the kuiyan varies between about 6 and 13 meters. Its base is about 2 meters in diameter while the top is narrower. Water is available at a depth of 1-1.5 meters immediately after monsoon and gradually lowers down.

End Water Poverty (EWP) – a global civil society coalition that is working towards ending the water and sanitation crisis – is one of many organisations, which appreciates the work of the JMP. According to EWP, in future when more data is collected, the global coverage figure of those who have access to safely managed water and sanitation will decrease. However, it is crucial to note that this potential decrease will be more representative of the world we live in today as opposed to extrapolated data. With the need to improve on data gathering and reporting methods, EWP makes the following recommendations:

Proactively engage more institutions such as the UN-Habitat to provide and use their data on slum dwellers for this report.

Proactively reach out to service providers (governments and non-governmental organisations) to use the criteria for safely managed services when building new infrastructure.

Increase the scale of investment in order to meet such ambitious goals. We urge governments to use their tax policies to increase domestic resource mobilisation as a key source of finance

Research has shown that the issue of transgender and intersex access to sanitation is under-addressed in the water, sanitation and hygiene development sector. Andrés Hueso and Priya Nath of WaterAid UK and Mamata Dash of WaterAid India, discuss the human rights issues at the heart of the matter, and what could be done

Next time you are in a public place – a restaurant, a festival, an institutional building, a school or even your workplace – have a look at the toilets. Usually, what you will see is two sections: one for males, and one for females.

Recently released figures reveal the scale of the challenge ahead to bring universal access to water and sanitation in Nigeria by 2030, international development organisation, WaterAid, has said

Mai ruwa, or water vendors, in Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria

WaterAid’s analysis of figures released in the new ‘Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene: 2017 update and SDG baselines’ by the Joint Monitoring Programme – a body set up by Unicef and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to collate data on water and sanitation coverage – shows that Nigeria will only be able to deliver a community source of clean water within a 30-minute round trip to everyone by 2039.

On 7 June 2017, World Health Organization (WHO) was notified of a cholera outbreak in Kwara State, Nigeria, where the event currently remains localized. The first cases of acute watery diarrhoea were reported during the last week of April 2017 and a sharp increase in the number of cases and deaths has been observed since 1 May 2017. However, the number of new cases reported has shown a decline over the last four reporting weeks.

As of 30 June 2017, a total of 1558 suspected cases of cholera have been reported including 11 deaths (case fatality rate: 0.7%). Thirteen of these cases were confirmed by culture in laboratory. 50% of the suspected cases reported are male and 49% are female (information for gender is missing for 1% of the suspected cases). The disease is affecting all age groups.

Hope Spring Water blog

Thank you for visiting our blog. We are Hope Spring Water charity, we dig wells, we construct boreholes and do advocacy work for sanitation and hygiene in Africa. You can read about some of our projects and events on this blog. To find out more information about us, please visit our main website.